Four ways to untangle your busy life
Written by Mike Verano
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“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
—The Little Prince
[dropcap]Confucius said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Many of us would respond, “Great for Confucius, he didn’t have to deal with super highways, technology, multi-tasking, the Internet or the nightmare that is trying to choose the right health care plan.” To which Confucius would most likely respond, “Who created these things?” To which we would reply, “We did.” Leaving him to ask, “Why did you do this?” Sheepishly averting our gaze and kicking the ground, we would say, “To make our lives . . . easier?”[/dropcap]
According to Merriam-Webster, the word complicate means “to intertwine, fold together, to make more complex.” Amen to that! Simple, on the other hand, means “single, having one ingredient,” or, my favorite, “essential.”
It seems that most of us feel our lives have become too complicated when we’ve lost sight of what is essential to us. It is often the case that the things we value the most get lost under the endless shuffle of life’s minutia. Many of the people I see in therapy lament, “I long for the simple life.” When asked how their life became so complicated, the initial response is often silence, followed by a squinting stare into the distance as if they were looking through a window covered in grime. A lot of time in therapy can be spent cleaning off that window only to find that the view is not that pleasing. It can be disheartening to realize that the complexity and chaos we find when we look around has been our own doing.
Some fool-proof methods used to complicate our lives are:
- Take on more tasks than we have hours in the day to complete.
- Make major life decisions based on guilt.
- Ignore the warning signs of excessive stress, i.e. sleeplessness, headaches, excessive worry, and hope they will go away.
- Develop relationships based on how we hope people will be.
- Keep a mental list of all the bad things that have happened to us.
- Insist that life be fair.
- Routinely say “yes” when we mean “no.”
While it would seem to make rational sense to just stop doing the above, it is never that easy, or I should say, that simple.
Since very few of us wake up one day to find our lives are tangled messes, we have to face the fact that we had more than a subtle hand in tying ourselves into knots. But why would we do this to ourselves? Why would sane, rational and intelligent people want to contort their lives like a Yoga instructor hyped-up on an all-day energy drink?
Primarily, it has to do with our obsession with doing, over just being. Our conditioning teaches us that the more we have on our To Do List, the more our lives have meaning. Add to this our collective fear that we will run out of time before ever experiencing the “good life” and we end up like frenzied shoppers in the supermarket before a big storm. When we’re in survivor mode, we’re going to stock up on items we know we will never use.
The good news is that the simple life—a return to what is essential—is not only within our reach, it was never lost. However, the problem with discovering this is twofold. Because it’s simple, it’s not hard to find, thus making searching for it not nearly as fun for the mind, which loves adventure. The second is what the Little Prince suggests, we have been looking for it with the wrong instrument. It is the mind that creates the complex, complicated and frustrating world we live in. Sending the mind in to fix this problem by thinking more is like trying to lose weight by overeating. When we turn the search for the simple life into even more work for ourselves we end up being psychologically and emotionally obese—carrying the weight of our world on our shoulders.
[quote]The simple life—a return to what is essential—is not only within our reach, it was never lost.[/quote]So how does one use the heart to rediscover simplicity and shed this unnecessary weight? Well, all pun intended, it’s a no-brainer. First and foremost, we should stay out of our head as much as possible. We can do this formally by taking up practices like meditation, yoga, tai chi or Qigong. Less formally, we can simply return our attention to the present moment—our actual experience of what is happening right now—whenever we feel lost in thought. The simple self-question of “Where’s my head” helps to keep us from getting lost in past or future worries.
Here are some other tried-and-true techniques for untangling the knots in our lives:
- Make friends with change. Move out of the mental state of resistance into one of acceptance. Life gets really simple when we expect things to be the way they are rather than the way we want them to be.
- Question your answers. Check to see if you’re using old ideas, theories or techniques as tools on new situations. Asking yourself “Is it so?” allows for new insights and creative responses. In this way we reduce chances for self-injury due to the misuse, or overuse, of outdated tools.
- Stop mistaking excitement for happiness. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the search for happiness often makes life more difficult. This is due to confusing excitement, a momentary thrill, with a lasting sense of ease and contentment. Happiness is an internal experience that is there whenever we stop the frantic search for it—particularly in things that come and go.
- Try the Power of Subtraction. Despite being told that we can attract whatever our hearts desire, there is a deep sense of dissatisfaction tied to this secret. Practice putting things back, or not picking them up in the first place, and see if you don’t have more room for things like joy and love.
Finally, we can heed the words of Leonardo da Vinci who said, “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.”
It doesn’t get any simpler.